Family Fun
Are you bored with watching your children’s boredom as they play boring video games?
Do you send your children emails to tell them in which This kind of’s bedtime?
When you decide to spend your weekend in Puncak or Pelabuhan Ratu, do they keep asking, “Are we there yet?”
If you answered ‘yes’ to one or all of the above, maybe This kind of’s time to reconnect as a family circle as well as to communicate face-to-face.
When you were children, you didn’t possess the Internet, let alone smart phones. Unless you lived in a war zone, the planet was a safer place as well as you had a park or street to play in with your friends. You probably played board or card games in each others’ homes, rather than hyperspace. Then there are pencil as well as paper games.
Rules are made to be broken!
None of the following activities have fixed rules, yet you must think of the available space as well as make rules to avoid breakages of ornaments as well as limbs. The basic idea behind all of these games will be to communicate. No one has to win or you’ll have a bunch of losers. However, if you think in which someone needs a confidence boost, then rig the ‘rules’ to ensure s/he ends up feeling better. If your teenagers think the games are “too childish”, then bring out your own inner kid so they’ll be less bashful!
Words
Many years ago, having climbed to the peak of Gunung Batur in Bali, my son as well as I headed for Lovina beach where I treated myself to a massage given by an elderly deaf-mute woman who walked up as well as down my back. What lingers longer in my memory than the pain was in which we communicated very well. She told me, “When I was a child, I was a not bad dancer.”
Yes, we communicated in body language, with few recognisable gestures.
Similar to Charades (guess the book or movie title), the mimer says nothing – yet will be allowed to laugh. Whoever tells the mimer the exact sentence gets a point as well as then takes centre stage to mime another sentence involving lots of movement.
For example:
- Excuse me. Can you give me directions to Monas?
- I’m washing my hair. Could you answer the phone, please?
- There’s an ink stain on your shirt / blouse under the left armpit.
On The Road
These are a few ideas for when you’ve all got tired of playing I-Spy or counting the number of folk on motorcycles not wearing a crash helmet. No equipment, apart through brainpower, will be needed.
Shopping List
You start: “I went to the shop as well as bought (eg.) a can of baked beans.”
Next person says: “I went to the shop as well as bought a can of baked beans as well as (eg.) a bar of soap.”
In turn, everyone repeats: “I went to the shop …” as well as adds an item to the list.
Some thirty years ago I joined a group who travelled overland through London to Marrakech in Morocco. This kind of was a very long journey, as well as I can still remember the “can of distemper”!
Alphabet Soup
A-Z of topics
Eg. Fruits: A will be for apple, B for banana, C will be for ….? as well as so on.
some other topics: places, vegetables, colours, animals, etc.
“Grannie doesn’t like T …
… so, what can we give her instead?”
Chocolate will be a wrong answer, as will be water.
However, cocoa as well as coffee are not bad answers because they don’t include the letter ‘t’.
Try with some other topics.
Word Chain
The last letter of a word, or the last two letters for a more literate group, becomes the first letter of the next. eg. gamElephanTraiN… or gaMEaNT. Anyone who repeats a word or who can’t go – as well as no word starts with NT – will be ‘boinged’. Keep score.
Outdoors
If you’ve got a garden, so much the better, yet if not, or if This kind of’s raining, with care most of the following can be adapted to fit available space indoors.
yet not a not bad water fight!
Rules in official sports are amended with great regularity, so feel free to adapt whenever as well as however you wish. Think of the variations between tennis as well as badminton, or hockey as well as cricket, or volleyball as well as sepak takraw.
How about one-legged football or creating bats as well as balls out of scrunched-up newspapers? Try tossing flip-flops into a bucket, long-distance hopping, walking backwards relay races, paper-plane creating as well as throwing for distance or nearest a target.
Treasure Hunt for ‘Found Objects’
These could be alphabetical, things in which all begin using a certain letter, or by type, eg. empty jamu sachets, water bottle labels (I’m still looking for the ‘Wet’ brand once spotted in Tomang.)
Build a den
A table covered with old bed sheets will do. Alternatively buy a cheap tent; they can often be bought along a Jakarta roadside. Dens can be used as rewards, as ‘sin bins’, a magic castle, a time machine…
Or a museum for displaying collections of, say, seashells, or found objects. Or an exhibition space for works of art, perhaps sculptures made through found objects.
Remember to have fun!
Note: Most of the above are ‘all my own work’. However, if you’re still stuck for ideas, check out some of these free e-books: http://ebooksgo.org/free-recreation-ebooks.html
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Family Fun
Family Fun